Hay and foraging equipment are utilized in the processing of plant material and include mowers, conditioners, flail choppers, windrowers, and balers for both dry and silage uses. The hay system, such as a square baler, includes a pickup mechanism, which picks crop material from the ground and supplies it to a bale-forming chamber. The bale-forming chamber receives the crop material and includes a plunger or piston that applies an axial force against an accumulation of the crop material to form a substantially square-shaped bale. The plunger or piston can further apply a force to a face of the bale to further densify the bale. Once the bale reaches a certain or desired density, the bale may be pushed and extruded out the rear of the baler.
As the baler is driven across the field encountering crop material, the crop material may be bunched or otherwise non-uniformly distributed causing surges in the amount of power required from the power source to process the material encountered. If the material encountered is too thick or even includes some foreign material such as a piece of wood or a stone, a plug can be formed that causes the baling mechanism to be overloaded. In some machines, this requires operator intervention requiring the operator to stop the tractor and try to unplug it by perhaps reversing the travel of the tractor to try to pull some of the material out. The encountering of a plug often requires the operator to stop the drive mechanism and then release various aspects of the baler mechanism associated with the flow of the material so that the plug can be removed either manually or by operating portions of the baler with mechanisms in their non-normal operating positions to try to clear the plug from the baler. Once the plug is removed, the operator then goes and repositions the mechanisms that were disengaged, moving them back into a normal operating position. These conventional techniques require at least some limited operator intervention and the operator can even potentially damage the machine by operating it with only some of the mechanisms being moved to a released position.
In other aspects, various unplugging devices are included in the feeding systems on hay and forage equipment which include drop floors, knife disengagement, reversers, rotor movement, pickup baffle positioners, power feed clutches, and the like. These devices are activated electrically, hydraulically, PTO driven, or a combination thereof. These devices are activated individually to make the necessary steps to relieve tight plugs and to then sequentially feed crops through the feeding device. Actuating these devices individually is cumbersome, time-consuming and difficult to understand for inexperienced operators.